Earning Money from Ad Tweets

Author: Jimmy

1Nov

Just a few days ago I had a discussion on the urgent need for monetization of web services under pressure of economic downturn and one of mentioned runners is Twitter whose way to distill money from its service appears blurred with “coming soon” promise.

Not in pursuit of “great ideas”, Magpie — a European company — has come up with simple service that helps users to moneterize their tweets by sending ad messages to followers occasionally.

First, you can enter your twitter’s identity and calculate how much you may earn monthly like the following screenshot:

With about 130 followers to this Twitter account you can earn up to 55 US dollars. Not bad though I doubt you can reach this amount practically because the more ads appear the more risk you would loose followers and that ends up you should never set up to the highest frequency for ad per number of tweets which can be adjusted from Start page.

Entering password so that you agree to authorize service to send ads from your account, you’ll soon see the first ad shown and you can check how much you earn from Account page for a single tweet.

Hey, you’ve got 75 cents (as current exchange rate) for the ad — good rate, no? However, you may now wonder how annoying the ad is. Not much, actually Magpie is doing good job to select the right ads that look like a normal conversation. See the example below that links to a blog post which your followers would likely think it was a normal article.

Interesting service! But before signing up to Magpie you should carefully consider if it would harm your reputation. Here are some advices you should do before (and after) sending the first ad to your buddies.

Inform your followers that you’ll joint Magpie and ask it is annoying if they see ad messages occasionally.

Set low ad-tweet ratio, maybe 20 tweets per ad will not make your followers irritated.

Regularly check Magpie’s ad messages to see if they are relevant to what you often tweet (as promised). If they are about out of acceptable limit, stop the service immediately.

Personally, I don’t register to Magpie with my twitter’s account but it may not be the case if an account is just used to broadcast blog posts like RSS feed. Weighing the money one can actually earn to one’s image, I can guess only a few people will sell themselves to Magpie, so the nightmare about unmanageable stream of ad tweets may not come with Magpie yet.